from Notes On The Constraints of Architecture
Voice from an Unfurling Sail
from Notes On The Constraints of Architecture
The only thing more frightening
than the abyss
Is the lie of oblivion,
The thought that the abyss, that great rent of nothing,
Might not be.
This doesn’t bring terror to you in your sleep,
But it reminds you to focus on that which you can see—
That which you know to be real.
One example: The hole in the curtain
Above your part of this large room
And the circle of light
Moving down the wall and onto the bed.
You wake just as the light reaches the plate of your face
So that it burns your vision and all you see is white.
This daily moment is your thorn.
And you have known many thorns.
You have known how thorns
Can expand the limits of one’s flesh—
How thorns can resist restraint.
By limits, I mean to say earnest possibilities.
By restraint, I mean to say dualistic mythology of Giant
Forms.
And you were raised with a unique understanding of this variety of possibilities.
As a child you were not recognized on the streets.
You barely recognized yourself in a puddle.
An angel winked at you from a tree when you turned away from
the distorted image of what
you thought your
face
Had become and what the water showed it to be.
Both existence and persistence line the rim of routine.
An image of self can remain constant where reflections are not.
This room has no mirrors, only paintings.
The birds in these paintings look back at you earnestly,
As if they were your reflection
Or you were theirs.
You feel drawn to the paintings
When remembering the tree, the woods,
The birds, while touching the frames.
It is not lost on you that the splinter
In your hand has been there for many days.
At night the stillness of frames is comforting and terrifying.
And the mornings, rarely varying,
Are filled with the most careful music of all:
The human voice. No
Piano or cello can remain as heavy as the words
Collecting around the corners of this large room.
It would seem to you that the corners
Would one day fill and the older words would be forgotten.
But they do not go away. You see things you said last month, last year.
They merge. They become an abyss of infinite possibilities.
They make the room so infinite and white
That you walk on your shadow.
And because you do not see your shadow,
Or even feel the curve of its presence,
You find it necessary to question your existence.
There is no need for questions when answers dwell in abundance.
I know you are not puzzled by light or the lack of light
For the transient are asleep in the past,
Waking in the present, and dying in the future—
So what is it about this that confounds you?
It is the blur between everything you’ve written
And everything you’ve read?
You claim it all for your own and rightly so.
No one here wishes to take that from you.
Instead, the memory of the Giant Forms
Will be on your face each time you wake.
Those in the room will see a vision of what was once there
And in their faces you will see a blurred reflection of your past.
You will continue to forget the velocity of your own songs.
This is a banana peel my grandfather slipped on.
Bronzed, I keep it in his father’s boot from the war,
The boot he bled in, the war he started, the war
That stretches into everlasting flight. In the trench alongside motorized
rats,
They both fell on this string-less banjo, both did a dance
On this string-less banjo, both tried to tune this string-less banjo.
Eventually they slept on the string-less banjo and hail landed in their
mouths.
Ah, the infinite possibilities inside the oblivion of an open mouth!
Ah, the steering wheel on this boat in space!
I have not yet fought in the ongoing war—the days I cut from the
calendar
Turn to yellow stones and the narcotic night runs in the third rail
Of this runaway train called Descending Lilies In Quaking Field.
I am a fake wooden
door
In the back of a burning seafood restaurant. Glass, broken from bottles,
Tangos in the trees, suspended by the hair of the women that dance
In the mess of smoke and teeth. Xylophones fall from clouds
And if I hum the right song, I might slip on this peel,
Don some relic, perhaps the greenhouse mask, and steal
From these grapes the breasts they never knew they had.